ROSMALIA FERREIRA SANTOS

Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the study of the History of Political Thought
School of History
Queen Mary University of London

POLYPHONY AS A POLITICAL CONCEPT

QUENTIN SKINNER AND T . H GREEN: THE GENEALOGY OF A
POLYPHONIC STATE

Project Funded by the Coordination for the Improvement of

Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) from March 2015 to
August 2016

London
September- 20016
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ABSTRACT

The present work emerged from my attempt to challenge the scepticism of

Professor Quentin Skinner about the possibilities of attaining any conceptual definition of
State that could be set apart from its ideological content. It is the result of research
conducted under the generous tutorship of Professor Skinner himself at the School of
History of Queen Mary University of London, as visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study
of The History of Political Thought during 2015 and 2016. This essay aims to apply the
Skinnerian methodology for historical research to the political theory of Thomas Hill
Green (1836-1842). I will try to demonstrate that Skinner’s method can help to frame
Green’s position on the arguments for a modern theory of State towards the end of the 19th
century. Green’s enterprise can be read as historical evidence of what I will call a
polyphonic concept of state. This paper will show the intellectual contribution of two
English theorists, separated by the span of at least 100 years and engaged in a distinct
academic endeavour, yet linked by the common purpose of paving the way for institutional
changes by the renovation of the language of politics. I start by describing Skinner’s
intellectual trajectory and the linguistic concepts that support his methodological claim,
then move on to examine Green’s work in the light of Skinner’s precepts, and, finally assert
the importance of a Skinnerian reading of Green as far as my notion of State-polyphony is
concerned.
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QUENTIN SKINNER AND T.H GREEN: THE GENEALOGY OF A POLYPHONIC CONCEPT OF STATE

1. THE CROSS-DISCIPLINARY PROJECT OF QUENTIN SKINNER AND HIS LINGUISTIC APPROACH TO HISTORICAL
STUDIES – SOME KEY CONCEPTS

Prior to any attempt to proceed with the application of Skinner’s method to

Green’s intellectual contribution during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, I
need to make some observations about the nature of this essay. Firstly, I would like to
stress that my approach to the subject matter of this paper – conceptual innovation – is not
in agreement with some of the views of the authors that I am examining. Second, the
authors treated here do not agree in their approach to the subject above. The notion that
thoughts and ideas have a full and recoverable history of their own does not have in Green’s
work the implications that they possess in Skinner’s theory. This recent unfolding of the
academic interests – to whose emergence and development Quentin Skinner made a
groundbreaking contribution – was unknown to Green. On the other hand, the
understanding of concepts as a fundamental unit of the social fabric – which was not even
available to Green – has an ambiguous status in Skinner’s approach. In Skinner’s view,
concepts only matter insofar as they can be verbalized, that is, as linguistic entities. In
consequence, the idea of a history of concepts is pointless, if not impracticable, to him. In
relation to the scope of a theory of the State – with which this essay is primarily concerned
– my approach disagrees with Skinner’s recent views. Since the appearance of his seminal
work – the Foundations of Modern Political Thoughts in 1978, Skinner has made an
extraordinary departure from his original views. Having announced in the preface that the
second great purpose in the book “was to indicate something of the process by which the
modern concept of State came to be formed”, his thought has evolved to a decisively
sceptical vision, where no “distinctive concept” of State is ever possible.1
Skinner’s change has been credited to his attempt to respond to the numerous
attacks on his theses, attacks probably also motivated by his sharp and merciless tone
towards the rival approaches. This radical alteration of his conception of State can offer a

1
SKINNER, Quentin. “The Foundations of Modern Political Thought” v.1: the Renascence. Cambridge
University Press, 1978. (v.1 p ix),
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particular challenge to the study of his contribution to Political Theory. Moreover, it seems
to me that he is still required to reconcile his new “visions of politics” with the assumptions
advanced in The Foundations. Although I will be examining some of his postulates, I do
not intend to offer a full account of his approach or even an in-depth analysis of any of his
assumptions. My task will be an attempt to utilize Skinner’s methodological precepts to
frame the contribution of T. H. Green for the emergence of a new concept of State towards
the end of the nineteenth century. I would like to begin by taking a closer look at these
precepts and see how they are formulated and defended against the large number of
objections raised against them from different academic fields.
An exemplary work published in 1988 by James Tully – Meaning and Context:
Skinner and his Critics – gives an overview of Skinner’s intellectual contribution,
displaying a selection of the most acute and challenging critiques to his theory, as well as
the answer that Skinner offers to the questions raised by those critics, in terms of either
clarifying, defending or reformulating critical points. As can be seen in Tully’s book, the
most scathing attack on Skinner’s theory seems to be the objection that his methodology
defeats its purpose, insofar as it makes the study of intellectual history a sterile exercise of
scholastic eccentricity. In other words, his approach to classical texts as a purely historical
phenomenon – that is, determined by the author’s intentions and his linguistic context –
would have the effect of stripping the classics of any contemporary relevance. Therefore,
the outcome of his method would be “to bury them” or, at best, to consign them to the
‘dustiest interest of antiquarians’. 2
This caustic critique seems to afflict Skinner a great
deal. It is doubtful, however, that the reason for his distress is only the inability to allay the
ill disposition of such critics. A brief biographical note can shed some light on this
trembling angle of Skinner’s bold project.
There seems to be, indeed, in the heart of the objection outlined above, a hint of
maliciousness cast against Skinner’s intellectual identity, permeated by his cross-
disciplinary taste. In being accused of turning the classical philosophy into history (hence
robing it of its immortality), and history in the writer’s intention, he is blamed with killing
two birds with one stone. Neither philosophy nor history would survive as a subject of

2
SKINNER, Quentin. “Reply to my critics” in TULLY, James. "Meaning and context: Quentin Skinner
and his critics." 1988. p.286.
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social and political relevance to his enterprise: what would be the point of studying texts
written in the past if they have nothing to teach us?
Skinner’s exasperation on this point seems to be justified, not only for the
gravity of the accusation, but also because he had been unable to choose his dearest
discipline from a very early age. Split between a passion for Philosophy and a love of
History, his influences were Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and R. G.
Collingwood’s writings about interpretation and historical explanation, with which he
became acquainted when still a teenager. Arriving at Cambridge in 1959, Skinner
confessed to having chosen to take a degree in History driven rather by convenience than
deliberate choice.3 Soon he would find that there existed the possibility of specialising in
the history of philosophy, principally in the history of moral and political philosophy,
where he was to make his major contribution. In 1978, elected to the position of Professor
of Political Science at the University of Cambridge, Skinner had the opportunity of
articulating and promoting his predilection for both philosophy and history. According to
James Tully, this chair served to give recognition to his extensive scholarly contribution
to the methodology of history, social sciences and literary criticism, as well as the
application of his method to contemporary Philosophy and the history of political thought.
The Foundations of Modern Political Thought comes out in 1978, as a two-volume survey
of political thought during the Renaissance and Reformation.
The Foundations sets out Quentin Skinner’s very ambitious project, which is
announced straightforwardly in the preface. He aimed to offer an account of the principal
texts of late medieval and early modern political thought from Dante to Bodin – passing
through Marsiglio of Padua, Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Luther and Calvin, amongst
others; to use these texts to explain the process of formation of the modern concept of
State; and, finally, to lay the foundations of his methodological approach or “to exemplify
a particular way of approaching the study and interpretation of historical texts”. 4 This
declared intention coincides with James Tully’s argument of the tripartite axis of Skinner’s
work: the interpretation of historical texts; surveyance of ideological formation and

3
“I hovered between applying in history and in philosophy, and I only chose history because I won a
Scholarship in that subject and was persuaded, I am sure rightly, that I would be more likely to do well in
history than in philosophy. (Interview given to the project Making History, developed by the Institute of
Historical Research in April 2008).
4
SKINNER, Quentin. The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Renascence. Vol. 1. Cambridge
University Press, 1978. Preface, p.x
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change; and analysis of the relationship between ideology and political action.5 The
suggestion found in Tully’s review is that Skinner’s study of the connection between
ideology and political action subordinates the other two dimensions in his theory.
According to him, Skinner’s interest in methodology developed out of his dissatisfaction
with both Marxist and liberal forms of addressing those issues. The implication of this
argument seems to be that Skinner’s political theory is not only connected to his
methodological postulates, but is largely dependent on them. In fact, Tully’s essay “the
pen is a mighty sword” is clearly a case for this claim: “I hope to show”, he assures us,
“that Skinner is not solely concerned with history and method, but also using both to throw
light in the present”.6 I will try to use Tully’s argument that Skinner’s political theory is
dependent on his method, pushing the conclusion slightly further. I will suggest that
Skinner’s methodology is the essential part of his political theory. This assumption will
not only provide a methodological key to frame T.H. Green’s politico-theoretical
contribution, but it will also enable me to treat Skinner’s methodological approach as a
mechanism of social and political intervention in its own right.
To speak about Skinner’s methodology is to speak about his studies about
language. In a series of articles, published since the beginning of his career, he has
managed to draw on linguistic studies from authors of the first half of the 20th century,
such as the Austrian and British philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin and Paul
Grice, as well as contemporary scholars such as John Searle, to develop his theses. A
central concept in Skinner’s approach is the theory of “speech-act”, borrowed originally
from J. L. Austin. Skinner summarizes his understanding of this notion in an essay called
“Conventions and the understanding of speech acts” published in 1970, where he writes:
“every serious utterance has some particular illocutionary force co-ordinate with its
ordinary meaning as a locution”.7 However, there are a few key concepts implicated in
this assertion that need some elucidation in order to grasp the meaning of Skinner’s
definition. The first set of concepts are the terms meaning, sense and reference. These are
all linguistic entities of crucial relevance to Skinner’s approach, although far from being
obvious or undisputed in the linguistic field. The theory of sense and reference was first

5
TULLY, James. "Meaning and context: Quentin Skinner and his critics." Oxford, Polity Press, 1988. p. 7
6
Ibid.
7
SKINNER, Quentin. "Conventions and the understanding of speech acts." The Philosophical Quarterly
20.79 (1970): 118-138, p, 118.
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put forward by the German mathematician Ludwig Gottlob Frege in 1892. According to
Frege’s conception, sense is the linguistic property of a meaningful word. A term is said
to have sense when it can be described and understood abstractly, regardless of the
existence of anything corresponding to that term in the material world. An imaginary being
(for instance, a unicorn), has a perfect sense, insofar as it can be described and understood,
although no real existence. However, most of the terms, besides having sense, also have
reference. This means that they point to something tangible in the real world as their
referent. A real table is the reference for the word ‘table’. The real table is both concept –
a mental image of a table – and extension, the material thing called ‘table’. Reference is
sometimes conceived as part of the meaning of a word, whereas sense is referred to either
as the equivalent of meaning or as a component of it. These concepts, sufficiently complex
in linguistics, acquire a very intricate coloration when applied to evaluative or normative
words, such as ‘beautiful’, ‘courageous’, ‘justice’, for instance. Some will say that such
terms have no reality, since it is not possible to be precise about their reference in the
world. Although I shall not delve deeply into the linguistic quarrels, I will try to show how
Skinner manages to apply these concepts to his subject matter, philosophy and history,
before we can use them to analyse Green’s theory.
In an article published in 1979, The idea of a cultural lexicon, Skinner makes
his own attempt at clearing up this ground, by trying to show how the concepts of sense,
meaning and reference could be applied to appraisive terms. To do so, he introduces the
idea of “criteria”. The sense of a word is, thus, associated to the criteria, or conditions,
required to apply that word, rather than any distinct one. Skinner gives an example to
clarify the point: the criteria to apply the term ‘courageous’ could be said to be: 1) a context
of voluntary actions; 2) the actor involved must have faced some danger; 3) he must have
faced it with some consciousness of its nature; etc. If we succeed in grasping these criteria,
we can be said to grasp the sense or meaning of the word ‘courageous’.8 The option here
seems to be to treat sense as the equivalent of meaning. As for the reference of an
evaluative term, Skinner understands the nature of the “circumstances” in which the word
can be correctly employed to designate a particular action or state of affairs.9 Nonetheless,

8
Skinner, Quentin. "The idea of a cultural lexicon." Essays in Criticism 29.3, 1979 p.210

9
Ibid. p. 210
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it can be particularly challenging to differentiate sense from reference based on the abstract
descriptions above. A helpful way can be to think of “circumstances” as empirical
situations where the use of a particular word can be reclaimed to define that action or that
situation. Reference can then be described as the instance of the real world that materialises
the concept and the criteria for the application of a given word. Skinner illustrates the
point: “someone might call it courageous if I faced a painful death with cheerfulness.
However, it might be objected that strictly speaking no danger is involved in such
circumstances, and thus that we ought not to speak of courage but rather of fortitude.” 10
A painful death faced with cheerfulness is, thus, the reference for the term “fortitude”, once
it does not meet all the criteria to reclaim the application of the term “courageous”. I will
be applying Skinner’s conception of reference to analyse a very important aspect of
Green’s approach to the concept of freedom.
Returning to the theory of Austin and his followers, they claim that having
sense, reference and meaning is only one of the aspects of language. According to them,
words can also be used to perform actions in the external world, that is, to do things. This
aspect of language, they will call speech-acts. Speech actions can take different forms.
They can come out as a locutionary, illocutionary or perlocutionary act. For example, a
speaker or writer can do things using words in a locutionary or propositional way – for
instance, they can say or write ideas by putting forward words, sentences, arguments, and
theories –, or they can do things saying or writing words, sentences, arguments, in a
particular, intentional way, that is, with an illocutionary force. If the speaker uses certain
words to inform, warn, threaten or flatter, these words are said to have the illocutionary
force of informing, warning, threatening, flattering, etc. Words can also have a
perlocutionary force, i.e., an effect beyond the agent’s intentions, but what is essential to
Skinner’s theory and that will support many of his methodological claims is the idea of
illocutionary actions.
To put it in a simpler way, an illocutionary act is the ability of a speaker or
writer to do something purposefully, intentionally in speaking or writing in a particular
way. Skinner will have to make a great deal of effort to amplify and even to reinterpret
Austin’s postulates, to be able to apply the speech-act theory to the kind of vocabulary
used to interpret the social world. However, he is very certain that it is precisely for the

10
SKINNER, Quentin. "The idea of a cultural lexicon." Essays in Criticism 29.3 (1979): 205-224.p. 210
 Page |9

interpretation of the social world that the speech-act theory possesses its utmost relevance.
In this field, a mere grasp of the sense and reference of terms is not sufficient to determine
the meaning of a given utterance. To succeed in decoding the meaning of the social world
we have to be able to tell what exact range of attitudes a term can “standardly” be used to
express; that is, we need to know “what type of speech-acts the word can be used to
perform”. Skinner will further develop this idea in his concept of convention.11
At this point, it is possible to make a formal enunciation of Skinner’s method
for studies in intellectual history, built on the linguistic concepts outlined above. Firstly,
he assumes that there is an intended or illocutionary force in any serious utterance; second,
that this illocutionary force encapsulates the intention of the author in writing a particular
text; third, that if we are able to grasp such intention, we can specify what the author was
doing in writing that particular text; finally, that such a process can enable us to interpret
the historical meaning of texts written in the past. There are several layers of complexity
and difficulty that can be added to these assumptions. Skinner’s theory is subtle and refined
to an extent that usually confounds his critics. The notion of “intention”, for instance,
which is vital to his approach, appears in the essay Interpretation and the Understanding
of Speech Acts (2002), to vindicate the radical anti-intentionalist character of his
postulates.12 Likewise, the idea of “context”, another notion credited to his approach and
popularized as a means to interpret what a writer meant, is severely criticized and
dismissed by him in Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas (1969)13. In this
text, Skinner repudiates the overrating of the context as a recourse to explain the meaning
of historical texts. He claims that the writer’s context cannot do much for the
understanding of any statement made in the past. We will see that the writer’s context
remains, in Skinner, a crucial variable to decode the meaning of texts written in the past,
whilst he will re-signify it to accommodate his propositions. In the following section, I will
focus on two of Skinner’s precepts, which are central to my interpretation of Green’s
thought. I will examine the Skinnerian notion of convention and his re-signification of
context.

11
Ibid.
12
SKINNER, Quentin. "Interpretation and the understanding of speech acts. “Visions of politics 1, 2002:
103-127.
13
SKINNER, Quentin. "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas. “History and theory 8.1 (1969),
in Visions of politics 1 (2002):p.40
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The idea of convention appears in an article in The Philosophical Quarterly

Review in 1970, in the context of a linguistic discussion, where Skinner tries to deal with
certain lacunae in Austin’s theory.14 He was concerned about the problem of providing a
test for distinguishing acts that are genuinely illocutionary from a range of other linguistic
acts. After exploring some difficulties in Austin’s theory, Skinner builds on the distinction
between intentions and conventions in speech acts, made by the British philosopher P. F
Strawson, to suggest that any illocutionary act has an omnipresent element of social
convention. He uses several examples to illustrate his point; one that became very popular
is given by Strawson himself: a policeman sees a skater on a pond and says: “the ice over
there is very thin”. According to Strawson, this event characterises an illocutionary act of
warning – issued by the policeman – and no convention, other than the linguistic ones, are
needed in order to identify the action as an illocutionary act of warning. Skinner will argue,
however, that there are situations where a given illocutionary action can have an
illocutionary force pointing to a meaning which is different from the one enunciated in the
speech. For instance, if the policeman says, “I wonder if you would mind accompanying
me to the police station, sir”, the words undoubtedly have the conventional form of an
illocutionary force of enquiring (I wonder), whereas it can easily be recognized as the
performance of a request, probably an order.15 It follows, says Skinner, that one of the
necessary conditions for understanding, in any situation, what a speaker (S) must be doing
to his audience (A) in uttering an utterance (X) must be some understanding of what it is
that people in general, when behaving in a conventional manner, are usually doing in that
society and in that situation in making such utterances.16 In other words, the successful
recognition of illocutionary acts presupposes an understanding of the conventions
governing what counts as a warning, a request, an order, etc., in that particular society,
regardless of the locutionary form of the utterance. There must be a convention stating that
the policeman in both cases was not joking, enquiring, informing, or performing any other
acts than the one intended, that is, issuing a warning or an order. Although not free from
controversy, the notion of conventions will become central to Skinner’s methodology.
As defined by James Tully, he uses the term ‘conventions’ to name the common elements
connecting texts, such as a shared vocabulary, a set of principles, common assumptions,

14
SKINNER, Quentin. "Conventions and the understanding of speech acts."
15
Op.cit. p.122
16
Op.cit. p 133
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problems, conceptual distinctions and so on. Whereas to grasp the meaning of a text we
need to be able to interpret what the author intended in writing it, to disclose his intentions
we need to focus on the prevailing conventions governing the treatment of the issues and
themes with which the text is concerned. A dialectical dynamic underlies these
propositions. Because texts are acts, the process of understanding them requires us to
recover the intentions embodied in their performance, which can only be done by placing
the text in its conventional context. On the other hand, acts are in turn texts – they embody
intersubjective meanings that we can hope to “read off”.17 This means that the code to the
interpretation is inside the text; there is no need to have recourse to empathy in order to
decipher what is in the author’s head. This is a very important point to be underlined: all
is written. The task of the intellectual historian is to decode what is said in what is written;
to decipher what a writer meant in writing what they wrote, in the way they wrote. Our
subject is ideas wrapped in language thrown into the world. Nothing is left in the author’s
head; the text comprises the whole of its meaning. What the text may not provide is the
code for the historian to unearth this treasure. Such a key is to be found in the conventions
surrounding the text; the conventions surrounding the text can only be recovered by pulling
the text outside itself and fitting it into its linguistic and ideological context. This dialectical
scheme only makes sense if we understand the actual notion of context. Skinner believes
that to decode a linguistic proposition, the interpreter needs to correlate it with its relevant
context. The relevant context is not necessarily the immediate one surrounding the author.
“The problems to which writers see themselves as responding may have been posed in a
remote period, even in a wholly different culture”.18 Context is, rather, the place where a
linguistic proposition belongs as an argument; a place from which the audience to whom
it is addressed can intuitively understand it. The reason to fit the text to its context is the
presumption that “any act of communication will always constitute the taking up of some
determinate position in relation to some pre-existing conversation or argument.”19
Consequently, to understand what an author said, we have to identify the exact position he
has taken up in that conversation. When the proposition is placed in its native environment

17
SKINNER, Quentin. "Interpretation and the understanding of speech acts. “Visions of politics 1, 2002,
p.120.

18
Ibid. p.116

19
Ibid. p.115
 P a g e | 12

in a family of arguments, that is, in its linguistic and ideological context, the interpreter is
in the position to decipher the text, to characterise what the writer intended. For instance,
he is now able to say if the writer intends to attack or defend a particular line of argument,
to criticise or contribute to a particular tradition of discourse. At this moment, the
interpreter is able to make reasonable hypotheses about what the writer may have meant
by writing in that particular way.
The first conclusion to be drawn from Skinner’s reasoning is that the past is in
a dialogue with the past. This means, in the case I am considering, that whatever Green
meant in penning his writings, he was addressing the solution of problems posed during
his time. As I mentioned before, there has been serious contempt poured upon this
conclusion. In its friendliest version, the critics ponder that even if Skinner succeeds in
applying his method, and reaches the results he presumes, little if any relevance would
attach to such a deed. In its strongest version, the critics claim that the method makes the
study of past philosophers meaningless. In both cases, the question addressed to Skinner
is about the actual status of the study of past ideas in his scheme. Has it any relevance,
beyond mere intellectual curiosity? Skinner has answered this question in many rhetorical
ways, pointing out that we can always better understand our time by observing how people
in the past dealt with their own issues. However, it seems to me that Skinner’s view
encourages stronger pragmatic ambitions – even if he himself might not push the argument
that far. My analyses of Green’s theory can advocate this case. My line of argument will
be based on the assumption, which I have already mentioned, that Skinner’s methodology
is the backbone of his political theory. As suggested by James Tully, I defend the argument
that Skinner’s theory, insofar as it focuses on the past, is addressed to the solution of
problems of our own time, in perfect accordance with his own premises about the meaning
of any intellectual contribution
.
2. AN SKINNERIAN APPROACH TO GREEN’S POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT: MANIPULATING CONVENTIONS

The political nature of Skinner’s methodology can enable us to understand the

political and theoretical contribution of this other philosopher and social reformer of the
nineteenth century, Thomas Hill Green. In his short lifetime, 1836-1882, Green made one
of the most significant contributions to political theory, which changed the way that
liberals could think about freedom, laying the premises of state interventionism and paving
 P a g e | 13

the way for social democracy. In the following sections I will focus mainly, but not
exclusively, on three pieces of Green’s work: the well-known “Lectures on the principles
of political obligation” – delivered during three academic terms of 1879-1880 and
published after Green’s death by his former pupils, Nettleship, in 1885; “On the
different senses of ‘freedom’ as applied to will and the moral progress of man” – delivered
at the beginning of 1879 and also included by Nettleship in the collection “Works of Thom-
as Hill Green” in 1885; and last, but not least, Green’s “Lecture on liberal legislation and
freedom of contract” –a speech delivered to the Leicester Liberal Association in 1881
and published in the same year.
This latter piece is the only one of the set above to be published during Green’s
lifetime and the most relevant to the purpose of this essay. My aim is to focus exclusively
on those elements of Green’s text which enable us to visualise an attempt at introducing a
conceptual change into the liberal doctrine to create the conditions for the re-
characterization of the liberal notion of State. The reason why “Lecture on Liberal
Legislation and Freedom of Contract” is important here is the fact that in this text Green
will enunciate publicly and formally his concept of positive freedom, and make a case for
state interference. This key little piece summarizes Green’s arguments about the role of
the State in relation to freedom, advanced in his “Lectures on the principle of political
obligation” and “On the different senses of freedom”. Furthermore, his “Lecture on Liberal
Legislation and Freedom of Contract” fits perfectly the purpose of applying Skinner’s
methodology to interpret Green’s theory. This text was analysed in depth by Ben Wempe
in his “T.H. Green’s Theory of Positive Freedom”, following a comprehensive study of
Green’s unpublished manuscripts. Wempe defends the thesis that the “far-reaching and
beneficial influence of Green’s political doctrine is based on his Hegelian/idealist
metaphysics. The point made by Wempe corroborates my argument that Green’s theory
can be seen as evidence of the essentially polyphonic nature of the State. That is, a
distinctive and stable notion of State will still accommodate ideological disputes, conflicts
and antagonisms, without resolving them in a final conceptual formula. I will come back
to this point later.
To apply Skinner’s method to “Lecture on Liberal Legislation”, we need to start
by asking his fundamental question: what was Green doing in writing this speech? The
immediate context was a debate on the regulatory bills concerning labour conditions and
land property rights, passed by the English parliament in 1880. The text was read before
 P a g e | 14

the Liberal Association of Leicester in January of 1881. This fact and the initial tone of the
speech immediately reveal the points of common ground uniting Green and his audience:
they are both liberals and want to discuss the status of current political affairs in England
at that exact moment. In Skinner’s jargon, they shared a set of linguistic and ideological
conventions connected to that context. Green begins by pointing out the significance and
suitability of the argument he is going to advance, recalling the widespread opposition to
two bills which had been proposed in the last parliamentary session by Gladstone’s cabinet:
the Ground Game Act and the Employers Liability Act. The reference to this legislation
has a vital importance to the argument deployed in his speech, which would become one
of the bases of the theoretical and practical influence of Green’s political doctrine. This
immediate context contains an element of fortuity, of timeliness, that would make Green’s
intervention a turning point in the debate. Thirty years before it would not have been
possible to defend freedom based on Hegelian premises, making an attack on the right to
property as the background. Herbert Spencer had tried in 1851 with his acclaimed “Social
Statics”, without success in advocating the restriction of the right to property in the name
of liberal liberty. The section where he makes such a suggestion, was severely criticized
and, eventually, amputated from the book by Spencer himself in 1892 for fear of being
mistaken for one of the apologists of state intervention.
Returning to Skinner’s framing question about what Green was doing in
“Liberal legislation and freedom of contract”, we can take a look at his discursive
strategies. The two bills that Green used to make his point were the Ground Game Act that
prohibited clauses in tenancy agreements giving exclusive hunting rights to property
owners, and the Employers Liability bill that held employers responsible for injuries
caused to their workers by negligence, thereby rendering them liable for compensation.
These bills had been opposed on the grounds that they interfered with the freedom of
individuals to enter into contracts. The key point of Green’s speech was to refute this
argument and to stress the beneficial character of that kind of legislation to the whole of
society. To be precise about what he was doing and what point he was making in writing
about these bills, we need to go back to Skinner’s model. What did Green mean by
lecturing the Leicester Liberal association about the goodness of restrictive legislation?
This question can be answered in two ways. Firstly, by establishing what Green was doing
in writing his speech, what the illocutionary force was and what was the intention he
wanted to communicate to his audience. Second, and perhaps more importantly, by
 P a g e | 15

unveiling what he was doing in issuing that particular speech-act, that is, in making that
illocutionary point.
The first way to respond to the question of Green’s intentions is, certainly, the
easier one. We can single out a few kinds of illocutionary acts he could possibly be per-
forming in his speech. He was unmistakably describing and defending the beneficial
character of the legislation proposed; he was tactfully drawing attention to the political
contradictions of the liberal reformers in English history, in not supporting the bills, and
he was also suggesting that the nature of any social reform is always the same, that being
the liberation of humankind. All of these illocutionary acts can accurately describe Green’s
intention in responding to the arguments against protective legislation. However, one of
Skinner’s central claims is that a text may not always be transparent concerning the
author’s intentions. It can always contain an illocutionary force that the author may not
have wanted to make fully explicit; or instead, the meaning of the utterance and the context
of its occurrence may have been such that the speaker felt no doubt about the capacity of
his audience to grasp the intended illocutionary act, thereby seeing no need to be over-
emphatic. In effect, Green did not possess strong reasons to work on convincing his
audience that those regulations could be beneficial or that they should support them. He
had been invited to speak about the “taboo topic” by the Liberal Association itself.
Furthermore, the legislation he was alluding to had been proposed by the Liberal Party and
had the support of many in his audience. It is very likely that Green and his audience
already shared similar convictions on that point. What Green thinks that his audience does
not possess is a conceptual mechanism to defend these convictions from a strictly liberal
standpoint. The proposed legislation ran against a core liberal principle: the idea of
freedom. This mechanism is what Green intends to provide. It may be said that it
constitutes his ultimate intention in delivering that speech, using that particular discursive
strategy. The Skinnerian notion of convention, explored in previous sections, can help us
to frame this very delicate point and answer the second question about what Green was
intending in making his point in the way he did.
As we have seen, Skinner believes that the meaning of a text is only discernible by
placing it in its conventional context. Only by decoding the linguistic and ideological con-
ventions surrounding an argument can we know precisely what an author is really doing
in advancing that argument; by this means, we can be precise about whether he is chal-
 P a g e | 16

lenging, questioning, repudiating, strategically ignoring, or rather endorsing or legitimat-

ing the prevailing conventions of a given ideology. When an author is performing the sort
of illocutionary acts as the ones described above, he is said to be manipulating the conven-
tions of a given political language, of a given ideology. Manipulation of conventions is the
mechanism by which intellectuals and reformers change ideological and linguistic conven-
tions, push conceptual shifts and make political changes. This means that if Green intended
to provide his fellows with an argument to respond to the criticism regarding legislative
regulation – besides describing the facts and defending his point of view – he had to change
the conventions governing their beliefs. He had either to undermine part of the beliefs
they held and bring new conceptual elements to light, or enforce certain ways of thinking
that could favour new lines of argument. Both strategies involved manipulating some con-
ventional context present in his speech. The question then is, what is exactly the conven-
tional context surrounding Green’s conceptions and the beliefs of his audience? I have
already mentioned that he was speaking to and from the liberal political tradition. Hence,
it is reasonable to suppose that notions such as State interference, freedom, freedom of
contract, individual property, slavery are understood and justified on similar grounds by
Green and by his audience. We can grasp the conventional understanding of these notions
by observing how Green recalls the arguments deployed against the proposed labour leg-
islation by claiming that it offended the moral principles of a liberal society:
The workman,' it was argued,' should be left to take care of himself by the terms
of his agreement with the employer [because] if the law thus takes to protecting
men who ought to be able to protect themselves, it tends to weaken their self-
reliance, and thus, in unwisely seeking to do them good, it lowers them in the
scale of moral beings20

The pragmatic corollary of such an argument, which Green alleges to be ap-

plicable to all kind of social legislation – such as the factory acts, the education acts, and
laws relating to public health – is that nothing forces men into agreements; that being so,
supposing agreements to be mischievous, men would, in their own interest, gradually learn
to refuse them. Green was convinced of the fallacious nature of this argument. Men and
women in very deprived circumstances would never be in the position of refusing a bad
contract. However, he was fully aware that regulatory legislation on that matter, had

20
GREEN, Thomas Hill, Lecture on Liberal legislation and freedom of contract: In NETTLESHIP, Richard
Lewis (ed.) Works of Thomas Hill Green. Vol. 3. pp. 365-386. London/New York, LONGMANS, GREEN,
AND CO., 1888. p.365
 P a g e | 17

brought about an impasse in the Liberal doctrine. “Such is the language which was every-
where in the air last summer”, he argues, “and which many of us, without being convinced
by it, may have found it difficult to answer.”21 Therefore, that language needed to be
reformulated. The beliefs underlying that kind of argument had to be changed. Green will
make a move on the argument at the heart of the liberal creed: its conception of freedom.
In doing so, he provides a new conceptual key that will enable liberals like him to refor-
mulate some core principles of the Liberal doctrine. In strict Skinnerian jargon, Green will
be challenging some of the core liberal conventions: the notion of individual freedom, right
to property, and state intervention.
I am now in the position of placing a more substantial question about Green’s
intentions. We know that he will be manipulating conventions surrounding key assump-
tions connected to the political ideology of his context. However, what exactly will he be
doing by manipulating these conventions? What is his political point in making this
theoretical move? These questions can be illuminated by an example explored in James
Tully’s essay about Skinner’s approach to Machiavelli.

The practical context is the collapse of the Florentine Republic in 1512, the
disunity of the Northern Italian city-states, the presence of relatively large
French and Spanish armies, yet, fortuitously, a strong Medici prince in Florence
and an equally strong Medici pope in Rome. Thus, according to Machiavelli,
there was the possibility of the Medici family uniting Northern Italy, throwing
out the French and Spanish barbarians and, perhaps, laying the foundations for
a renaissance of the Roman Republic. However, the kind of activity Machia-
velli believed necessary for success — parsimonious violence, lying and deceit
— was 'vicious' and so unjustifiable and illegitimate in the face of the widely
held belief that a prince ought always to act virtuously. Therefore, if Machia-
velli was to convince the prince and the humanist elite that this activity was not
only necessary but justifiable, he had to re-describe it in morally neutral or even
commendatory terms. The obstacle to this was the convention condemning all
vicious princely activity and so it was necessary for him to challenge and repu-
diate it to make his political point, which was to excuse and encourage a range
of vicious activity on the part of the prince. 22

Machiavelli is, thus, manipulating ideological conventions in advising that princes must
learn to be able not to be virtuous,23 and what he was doing politically in manipulating

21
Ibid., p.365
22
TULLY, James. "Meaning and context: Quentin Skinner and his critics." , 1988 , p. 11
23
MACHIAVELLI, Niccolò. "The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price." , 1988,Ibid. p.55
 P a g e | 18

those ideological conventions was attempting to justify and to legitimate a range of intrac-
table political actions.24
Tully’s sketch of Machiavelli’s case is very appropriate to a Skinnerian reading
of Green’s enterprise. The immediate context here is the rapid industrialization and urban-
ization of the late Victorian era, exposing crudely the contradictions of the capitalist ex-
pansion. Social disparities, income concentration and further impoverishment of the poor
were the consequences of such an expansion. On the other hand, the boom in the popula-
tion, which more than doubled during Green’s lifetime, would put serious pressure on
questions like housing, health, education, child mortality, hunger, and the precariousness
of working conditions with long hours of grinding labour. Some legislative intervention
had been carried out since 1831, with the approval of the Third Factory Act, prohibiting
night work for persons under the age of 21. Looking at this situation, Green immediately
singles out the apparently contradictory nature of the liberal reformers in relation to these
bills. In the past they had “fought the fight of reform in the name of individual freedom
against class privilege”, but now, “the immediate object of reformers, and the forms of
persuasion by which they seek to advance them, vary much in different generations”.25
This is a very subtle point, connected to what Green was politically doing by manipulating
the conventions of the political debate on liberal reforms. Again, we can address the ques-
tion using Skinner’s framing question: what does Green mean in this passage? Ben Wempe
interprets it as the very object of Green’s theoretical intervention in his public speech. Ac-
cording to him, Green made two moves here: he drew attention to a qualitative change in
the kind of legislation which was being carried out – while earlier reform legislation could
be defended using the argument of increasing the liberty of individuals, the same claim
could not be made for the recent protective measures –, and he made an observation that
the new kind of legislation shows a clear break with the efforts and ends of liberal reform-
ers. Whereas Liberalism had so far been adequately characterised by its struggle to increase
the liberty of the individual, it would be difficult to make the same claim for the recent
Liberal proposals for reform. These two problem statements would be what the positive

24
TULLY, Op.cit p. 11

25
GREEN, Thomas Hill, Lecture on Liberal legislation and freedom of contract: In NETTLESHIP, Richard
Lewis (ed.) Works of Thomas Hill Green. Vol. 3. London/New York, LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.,
1888. p.367
 P a g e | 19

conception of freedom intended to resolve.26 This interpretation, despite being partially

accurate, misses the point of why Green believed that Liberals were still in the position of
defending the recent reform legislation on the same basis that they had done in the past.
Furthermore, it is arguable that Green was pointing out the change in the quality of the
legislation itself, and not in the position of the liberal reformer. In fact, he does not even
believe in a real break with the ends of the liberal reformers. Although he points out a
change in the position of the contemporary reformers compared to previous generations,
he believes that this was merely appearance. “The nature of the genuine political reformer
is perhaps always the same”, he claims, “The passion for improving mankind, in its ulti-
mate object.”27 So, why does Green observe that earlier generations of liberals fought
against class interest, whereas now they were not prone to do so?
What puzzles us here is the fact that Green chooses to use the language of
radicalism to speak about liberal reforms and exercises silence about the implications of
his choice. If we move from the text to the context of his speech we can observe that in his
“Lectures on Principles of Political Obligation”, writing about ‘the right of the State in
regard to property’, Green polemicizes Marx’s theory of accumulation, although he does
not quote the references.28 He presents the counter-argument that individual property and
accumulation of capital are not inherently incompatible with the self-development of the
labourer. Consequently, it is very unlikely that in using terms such as “class privilege” and
“class interest” he could have ignored the objection that the place of the “privilege”, as
well as that of the “interest”, had changed in the new context of class struggle. It is doubtful
that he would not have come across the reasoning that the reformer who fought for regu-
lation of trade could not fight for regulation of labour, because his position and interests in
the structure of classes had changed; it had evolved from reforming the society to preserv-
ing the status quo. If Green was able to envisage this objection to his argument, as we
presume he was, what did he mean by saying that the “genuine” nature of the reformer is
always the same?

26
WEMPE, Ben. TH Green's Theory of Positive Freedom: From Metaphysics to Political Theory. Vol. 3.
Imprint Academic, 2004. p.109
27
GREEN, Thomas Hill, Op.Cit p. 367
28
GREEN, Thomas Hill, Lectures on the principles of political obligation In NETTLESHIP, Richard Lewis
(ed.) Works of Thomas Hill Green. Vol. 2, London, LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO., 1888, p.175.
 P a g e | 20

Two factors may explain why Green can think of liberals as still prone to fight
the “cause of social good”, if they thought “a little longer”: 29 firstly, because he is espous-
ing a Hegelian conception of State – whose righteousness of interfering with “certain
agreements between man and man” he wants to advocate.30 In “On the Different Senses of
Freedom”, two years earlier, Green writes, “the modern State, in that full sense in which
Hegel uses the term (as including all the agencies for common good of a law-abiding peo-
ple), does contribute to the realisation of freedom”.31 This means that the Hegelian con-
ception of State did not see a contradiction between freedom – the highest aspiration of a
liberal – and the State. On the contrary, they were seen as identical in nature. Additionally,
Green does not seem to identify Liberalism with the bourgeoisie or an inherently conserva-
tive middle class. A remarkable fact about Green’s writings in the texts mentioned here,
and others from his collected works, it that he never uses the term “bourgeois” or “bour-
geoisie”, although the expression “proletariate” appears several times. In not making such
an identification, Green seems to believe that those liberals to whom freedom was dear for
its own sake, only needed to sufficiently consider the conditions of its maintenance in their
society, to support protective legislation. They would still need to acquire the language of
self-persuasion to mobilize their efforts towards the social good, but this is what he in-
tended to provide. This was his most serious theoretical endeavour, and those were the
conventions he set out to manipulate.
In order to offer his fellow citizens such language of self-persuasion, which
he sees as necessary to political radicalism, Green will search for what Wempe calls “a
standard or reference point” in all the instances of legislative interference with individual
freedom in the past.. He analyses the result of a number of concrete cases of protective
legislation, which were already accepted as legitimate by society, to support his argument.
As I have mentioned, this means, in Skinnerian terminology, that he will use these exam-
ples to manipulate some of the conventions surrounding the core principles of liberal ide-
ology. In doing so, he will advocate that State interference with individual rights was a
necessary condition for the exercise of freedom. His strategy is, thus, in perfect accordance

29
GREEN, T.H. Op.Cit. p.367
30
Ibid. 366
31
GREEN, Thomas Hill, “On the different senses of ‘freedom’ as applied to will and the moral progress of
man” In NETTLESHIP, Richard Lewis (ed.) Works of Thomas Hill Green. Vol. 2. London, LNGMANS,
GREEN, AND CO., 1888. P.7
 P a g e | 21

with Skinner’s methodological precepts. According to Skinner, prevailing conventions can

only be manipulated to a certain extent, that is, by accepting another set of commonplaces.
The innovation of a concept is a process of ideological negotiation, where any attempt at
stretching the conventions requires a justification in terms of what is already accepted. This
precept not only explains Green’s decision to review all the restrictive regulations that
were no longer subject to controversy regarding State interference – therefore, already in-
tegrated into a conventional context – but also explain Green’s focus on the conception of
freedom, which the conviction as to its supreme value, he shares with his audience.
Another claim that Skinner makes about manipulating conventions – and
which helps us to understand Green’s enterprise – is that changing the conventions of an
ideology corresponds to a change in the way in which some political action is represented.
According to James Tully, the manipulated conventions redescribe and recharacterize the
political action.32 When we apply this assumption to Green’s case, his ultimate intentions
come sparkling to the surface. Changing some of the prevailing convention of Liberalism
could recharacterize political actions based on liberal principles, namely, those ones con-
cerning the right of the state to interfere with individual property. The right of the State to
intervene and regulate social life is Green’s case. It is the status given to the State in the
liberal debate that he intends to amend. This is, therefore, his central, vital, utmost political
point in manipulating the conventions governing the liberal debate.
This point raises, however, another question about Green’s intentions. By
placing his speech only in the context of the liberal debate, we cannot fully understand the
meaning of his utterance. This is because Green is dialoguing with Liberalism from an
Idealist perspective, having Hegel as his background. Consequently, he is also manipulat-
ing conventions prevailing in a rival ideological context. Here he is enforcing the conven-
tions that will enable him to change the language of politics; there he is challenging the
conventions which prevent certain political actions from taking place. What is important
to stress it that Green is enforcing the conventions of one ideological context (Idealism) to
defy the antagonist’s field (liberalism), with a view to amalgamating both of them into one
single political formula, a polyphonic formula. That he was speaking about the state in

32
TULLY, James. "Meaning and context: Quentin Skinner and his critics." (1988) p. 11
 P a g e | 22

Hegelian terms can be testified by this passage written in “On Different senses of Free-
dom”:
Hegel holds that freedom, as the condition in which the will is determined by
an object adequate to itself, or by an object which itself as reason constitutes,
is realised in the state. He thinks of the state in a way not familiar to Englishmen
[…] as a society governed by laws and institutions and established customs
which secure the common good of the members of the society —enable them
to make the best of themselves” 33

An identical claim we can see resonating in his “Lecture on liberal legislation”:

“Society is, therefore, plainly within its right when it limits freedom of contract
for the sale of labour […]. It is equally within its right in prohibiting the labour
of women and young persons beyond certain hours […]. For the sake of that
general freedom of its members to make the best of themselves, which it is
the object of civil society to secure, a prohibition should be put by law, which
is the deliberate voice of society, on all such contracts of service as in a general
way yield such a result.34

In this passage, Green is using the term “society” to mean State, in perfect agreement with
the Hegelian conception. A few lines further on, He reaffirms his views about the role of
the State regarding freedom in a clearer and more assertive way:

Our modern legislation then with reference to labour, and education, and
health, involving as it does manifold interference with freedom of contract, is
justified on the ground that it is the business of the state […] to maintain the
conditions without which a free exercise of the human faculties is impossible
35

Whoever knows the history of the reception of Hegelian thought in England,

can evaluate how delicate was Green’s position in making these claims, although, by the
time he was delivering his speech Hegel was reaching the peak of his popularity in Britain.
Green belonged to one of the generations of Oxbridge students educated by philosophers
sympathetic to Germanism, as was his tutor Benjamin Jowett. Two decades on, the Hege-
lianism behind Green’s claims would provoke disgust in Herbert Spencer by seeing, ac-
cording to him, Oxford and Cambridge captured by “this old-world nonsense”. 36
Even
though the present context allowed Green to campaign for a Hegelian conception of State
on the liberal debate about the scope of legislative reforms, Hegel’s State would never
easily square with the liberal conception of freedom. It was not the case that the liberal
zeal for freedom could prevent the State from interfering with the individual’s power. The

33
GREEN, T. H. Op.cit. p. 6
34
Op.cit. p. 373 (emphasis added).
35
Op.cit. p.174
36
WILLIS, Kirk, "The Introduction and Critical Reception of Hegelian Thought in Britain 1830-1900."
Victorian Studies 32.1, 1988,p. 96
 P a g e | 23

case is that to convince his contemporaries that the State was equivalent to freedom, Green
will have not only to stretch a great deal of conventions, but also to be extremely tactful
in negotiating the commonplaces, in Skinner’s terminology, in acknowledging part of
what was already accepted as the meaning of freedom. This may explain why he introduces
his concept of positive freedom by agreeing with the liberal premises that – although free-
dom cannot be identified with the mere lack of compulsion to act – there can be no freedom
among men who act under coercion.
A final question that can be put here is about how conventions can be actually
manipulated. What does it involve, and what strategies will Green use to change the
conceptual key he intends to change? Tully stresses that manipulating the conventions of
a prevailing ideology involves changing the conventions governing the sense, reference or
evaluative force of some of the normative terms of that ideology. The alteration resulting
will then serve to re-characterize, or re-valuate, the political situation it represents.37 I have
already described how Skinner applies this linguistics concept to his theory. Sense is
related to a set of criteria for the appropriate application of a given term, while Reference
is the instance of the real world that materialises the concept by revealing those criteria.
Skinner thinks that Green manipulates the conventions of liberal ideology by changing the
reference of the term freedom. As he believes that the “mere removal of compulsion, the
mere enabling a man to do as he likes, is in itself no contribution to true freedom”, 38 he
will introduce a change in the reference of the term, expanding the criteria for its
application so as to accommodate the Hegelian notion of positive freedom. Certainly, this
will also imply a change in the sense of the word freedom. The new concept is enunciated
by Green in this classical formulation:
When we speak of freedom as something to be so highly prized, we mean a
positive power or capacity of doing or enjoying something worth doing or
enjoying, and that, too, something that we do or enjoy in common with others.
We mean by it a power which each man exercises through the help or security
given him by his fellow-men, and which he in turn helps to secure for them. 39

37
TULLY, James. "Meaning and context: Quentin Skinner and his critics." (1988) p. 13

38
GREEN, Thomas Hill, Lecture on Liberal legislation and freedom of contract: In NETTLESHIP, Richard
Lewis (ed.) Works of Thomas Hill Green. Vol. 3. London, LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO., 1888. p.371
39
Ibid. p.371
 P a g e | 24

The term freedom can now be evoked to name the capacity, or the power, for all
members of society to make the best of themselves. Such power or capacity is the new
reference of the term freedom. It is certain that it also presupposes the State as a mediator,
being one of the criteria of the new sense that each man should exercise his power through
the help or security “given him by his fellow-men”. His “fellow men” is the personification
of laws and institutions which compose the State. Freedom, thus, no longer refers to the
mere lack of restriction to do what one likes. A wandering savage has no restraint on his
actions, and yet he has no freedom. He cannot submit himself to restraint by society,
consequently, “the actual powers of the noblest savage do not admit of comparison with
those of the humblest citizen of a law-abiding state.”40 To submit is the first step towards
true freedom, proclaims Green, “because it is the first step towards the full exercise of the
faculties with which man is endowed.” 41
We can still wonder why Green expected to be heard by his contemporaries, in
making such a strong case. Skinner conjectures that his Christian political engagement
gave him an authoritative voice on the subject. In his perception, Green’s audience was
expected to support legislative prescription to protect the integrity of each member of the
community and increase the collective stock of freedom, because the alternative was to be
a slave. Skinner believes that Green’s theory of freedom is a contraposition to slavery, to
man as the property of another man. This appeal would be strong enough to convert his
contemporaries, to whom this idea of servitude was becoming repulsive.

3. TOWARDS A POLYPHONIC THEORY OF STATE

Green was very much a visionary. In the elections of 1895, the Conservatives
had a large majority of 61% of the seats against only 26% kept by the liberals. The electoral
disaster was credited to the failure of the Liberal Party to respond adequately to the new
social problems brought about by industrialisation. In this context, Green’s conception of
positive freedom and an interventionist state would be very influential up until the Great
War, when another wave of anti-Germanism was to spread over the country. His ideas
inspired the “New Liberalism” or “social Liberalism”, led by thinkers such as Leonard

40
GREEN. T. H. Op Cit. 371
41
Ibid. 371
 P a g e | 25

Hobhouse and J. A. Hobson, who provided a theoretical justification for the social and
industrial legislation of the reforming Liberal governments between 1906 and 1914,
especially under the premiership of Herbert Asquith, a former student of Green’s at
Oxford”.42
Nevertheless, the meaning of the Greenian enterprise extends far beyond his
contemporary influence. In dialoguing with his time, he injected an Idealist, Hegelian and
romantic note into the polyphonic texture of the Western mainstream conception of the
State. Green’s conceptual move corroborates the idea that it is possible to agree with
Skinner’s reasoning about the ideological content of any conception of the State, and still
have the ambition of conceptualizing it. To purify the meaning of state from its multiple
and even contradictory ideological subtract may not be a necessary condition for
objectivity, at least not, if we think of the concept of State as a polyphonic arrangement.
In music, polyphony means that two or more simultaneous melodic lines are perceived as
independent even though they are related.43 Similarly, a polyphonic concept of state is
permanently immersed in its ideological substrate, although this does not mean that an
agreement has not been reached. In a polyphonic agreement, dissonance and
contradictions, disputes and conflicts are not resolved in a final harmonic solution,
although they are integrated in the semantic "texture" of the concept. Such texture is at
once polysemic and allomorphic. This means that the same word (State) can have several
senses (polysemy) or the same meaning take different forms (allomorphy) – such as nation,
government, society, etc. This idea certainly needs further development. However, a
polyphonic agreement was what T.H. Green tried, and eventually succeeded in achieving
by manipulating the conventions of two antagonistic ideologies to shape a new conception
of State. What Skinner’s methodology enabled us to see is that thirty years before of forty
years later Green’s intervention would not have been possible. Consequently, far from
being mere intellectual curiosity, the study of Green’s writings shows that texts written in
the past, addressing a question specific to the author’s time, do not apply exclusively to the

42
JONES, Tudor. Modern political thinkers and ideas: an historical introduction. Routledge, 2012 p.105

43
The concept Polyphony (from the Greek “many sounds”), was introduced in Europe around the 10th
century. It is a musical technique where two or melodic lines, simultaneous and independent, create a specific
musical texture. Strictly speaking, any music in which two or more tones sound simultaneously is a
polyphony. Usually, however, polyphony is associated with counterpoint, the combination of distinct
melodic lines. The concept of polyphony was used in Linguistics by Mikhail Bakhtin to analyse the poetics
of Dostoyevsky and in psychoanalysis by Lacan.
 P a g e | 26

past, but can have a profound impact in the future. However refusing to concede a-
temporal power to ideas, Skinner would not disagree with such a conclusion. In one of our
meetings, discussing about Green’s expectations of being heard by his contemporaries,
Skinner commented that Green did not really convert them. To which I replied, “Well, he
converted us”… “He converted us”, agreed Skinner.

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 P a g e | 27

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